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The Times - Just the Sports, Please The Olympic movement must slim down if it is to thrive

They are the greatest show on Earth. But they are played out on such a scale that it is pointless to pretend, as the Beijing Organising Committee continues to do, that they are not political. If the Olympics were truly about sport and nothing else it would not matter where they were held or by what tortuous route their torch reached the stadium. …

It is to London that Mr Rogge should now be looking to restore the Olympic movement’s vitality and sense of purpose. In doing so he should not be afraid to heed the advice of the great Sir Roger Bannister on these pages, and think the unthinkable. It may be too late to move the 2012 Games from London to a permanent venue on, say, the slopes of Mt Olympus. But it is not too late to veto elaborate international torch relays. Despite the evidence of recent Games these are not an Olympic sport and they were anyway conceived, inauspiciously, by the Nazis. Nor is it too late to cut back the schedule of events to exclude sports, football and tennis among them, which already have greater prizes than an Olympic gold medal. More broadly, Mr Rogge should urge London to invoke the spirit of 1948, the last year in which it hosted the Games.

Barely 4000 athletes competed and the event cost £750,000 to stage - but it is remembered not for its modest scale but for the rebirth of the Olympic spirit after another, much deeper, crisis. London can do it again.

Yes please.